A Culture of Everyday Credit

Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance in Mexico City, 1750-1920

Marie Eileen Francois

Publication Year: 2006

Pawning was the most common credit mechanism in Mexico City in the nineteenth century. A diverse, largely female pawning clientele from lower- and middle-class households regularly secured small consumption loans by hocking household goods. A two-tiered sector of public and private pawnbrokers provided collateral credit. Rather than just providing emergency subsistence for the poor, pawnbroking facilitated consumption by Creole and mestizo middle sectors of Mexican society and enhanced identity formation for those in middling households by allowing them to cash in on material investments to maintain status during lean times. A Culture of Everyday Credit shows how Mexican women have depended on credit to run their households since the Bourbon era and how the collateral credit business of pawnbroking developed into a profitable enterprise built on the demand for housekeeping loans as restrictions on usury waned during the nineteenth century.

Pairing the study of household consumption with a detailed analysis of the rise of private and public pawnbroking provides an original context for understanding the role of small business in everyday life. Marie Eileen Francois weighs colonial reforms, liberal legislation, and social revolution in terms of their impact on households and pawning businesses.

Based on evidence from pawnshop inventories, censuses, legislation, petitions, literature, and newspapers, A Culture of Everyday Credit portrays households, small businesses, and government entities as intersecting arenas in one material world, a world strapped for cash throughout most of the century and turned upside down during the Mexican Revolution.

Contents

Illustrations

Tables

Acknowledgments

A decade is a long time, even to write a book about almost a century and a
half of Mexican history. I incurred innumerable debts in the process of
producing this book and surely will spend decades more repaying them.
Many scholars have shaped questions...

Abbreviations

Introduction

In 1802 an embroidered shawl sat in hock for six months in Mexico City. Its
owner, Gertrudis Castillo, a white fifteen-year-old woman from Guadalajara,
pawned it for a loan of four pesos at the Monte de Piedad, a public
charitable pawnshop. A century later in a private neighborhood pawnshop,
a customer listed as ‘‘Morena’’ hocked a string of corals and a silver...

In a downtown neighborhood of Mexico City in 1811, Ygnacia Ruiz pawned
a cotton jacket for six reales at the pulpería (corner grocery store) a block
and a half from her house near the Parque del Conde. A fifty-year-old
Creole widow, Ygnacia lived in the household headed by her son licenciado
Don Francisco Alvarez, with her other adult children (two daughters and
another son) and an indigenous woman who was a live-in servant. Her...

2. Collateral Lending: Pulperias and the Monte de Piedad, 1750-1840

A satirical pamphlet addressing Mexican storekeepers in 1820 strongly
rebuked them: ‘‘Not content with the customary earning of one real per
peso, maliciously you weave the net that traps the incautious, lending them
six and demanding from them seven, and making a web between tlacos, pilones and other effects, finding the account always in your favor.’’∞ A...

During the first half of 1868, just after Mexican statesmen reclaimed the
national government from the Austrian Maximilian, who ruled Mexico for
the French, María Robledo repeatedly visited the pawnshop of Don Agapito
Cortés in Portal de Cartagena in Tacubaya on the outskirts of Mexico City.
In nine visits María secured loans of two...

4. Brokering Interests: Casas de Empeno and an Expanded Monte de Piedad, 1830-75

Don Juan Acosta represented fellow pawnbrokers in a petition in 1842 to
change a new law regulating their trade. He highlighted the social welfare
and paternal role of brokers who assisted city residents with the ‘‘most
urgent need of sustaining their families.’’ In his proposal to Emperor
Maximilian to expand the...

In her 1887 memoir Face to Face with the Mexicans, American visitor Fanny
Gooch Chambers commented on numerous ‘‘public charitable institutions’’
in Mexico City. Her opinion of the Monte de Piedad was high; she
thought it ‘‘one of the noblest benefactions, enabling those whom misfortune
has visited to realize or receive advances upon valuables without the
risk of losing them. These...

The Pearl of Saint Catherine. The Ideal of Art. The Rose of the Sea. Shower
of Gold. In her memoir of her stay in Mexico City at the turn of the
twentieth century, Mrs. Tweedie characterized these colorful pawnshop
names, along with others for pulquerías, grocery stores, and butcher and
barber shops, as ‘‘funny and extremely inappropriate."1....

In February 1915 neighborhood women amassing ‘‘strength from who
knows where’’ removed sewing machines, desks, and dressers during
pawnshop sackings and carried them down the streets, fighting o√ others
who wanted the property for themselves. Pawnbrokers informed a reporter
from El Demócrata (a newspaper siding with Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist
cause) about the collective actions of these empowered ‘‘mujeres
del pueblo.’’ Their businesses...

Conclusion: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Politics

When pawnshops talk, what do they say? They tell us about the interlocking
weave of social relationships and economic, political, and cultural
strands of daily life. The pawning process constituted relations between
and among state and society, the negotiation of governance, the intersection
of patriarchy and capitalism, and links between politics, business,
and the household. Gender relations...

Epilogue: Still a Culture of Everyday Credit

In 1950 a feature film entitled Monte de Piedad told stories of people whose
lives intersected with the charitable institution. Throughout the century
before, investigative news pieces, poetry, novels, political satire, and even
the theatrical stage had featured collateral credit. Now it became part of the
golden age of Mexican cinema. The film...

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